Elon Musk Explains the Fatal Flaw of Flying Cars

What happens when they break down and fall out of the sky?

Smartest Man in the World Elon Musk sat down with Other Smartest Man in the World Neil deGrasse Tyson on a recent episode of Tyson's excellent StarTalk podcast. At one point, Tyson brought up the subject of flying cars, to which Musk responded:

I'm debating, like, should there be flying cars or shouldn't there be flying cars? I'm of two minds on that.

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If there are flying cars then, well, obviously you have added this additional dimension where a car could potentially fall on your head and would be susceptible to weather. And of course you would have to have a flying car that—where it will be like on autopilot, because otherwise forget it.

It's got to be autopilot, but even on autopilot, and even if you've got redundant motors and blades, you are still going from near zero chance of something falling on your head to something greater than that.

And there's also the noise challenge...

Something that I do think that would help a lot in cities is more tunnels, essentially with flying cars you are talking about going 3D. And there's a fundamental flaw with cities where you've got dense office buildings and apartment buildings and duplexes and they are operating on three dimensions. But then you go down to the street, and suddenly it's two dimensional...

I think if you were to extrapolate that to cars and have more car tunnels, then you would alleviate the congestion completely ... and you wouldn't need a flying car in that case, and it would always work, even if the weather is bad.